That Demon Rag
[Lest we forget, ragtime in its day was considered “the devil’s music” by the same logic, for the same reasons and by the same people as was heavy metal within our lifetimes. I guess that means that when you go to a pizza parlor 50 years from now, you’ll see a quartet of Judas Priest scholars in the corner recreating the sounds of yesteryear.]
Usually, however, when a rock and roll album has a demon on the cover, it’s tantamount to the Dick Tracy labelling kit...you remember, a text bubble hovering inexplicably in the middle of the comic strip with an arrow pointing to the offending article; in this case the sign would have to read:
| “Bad White-Person Music.” ====> |
We could be talking Savoy Brown, Ozzy Osbourne, John Fogerty, Metal Church, Dave Lee Roth, Uriah Heep, Ronnie James Dio, King Diamond...does it even matter? Worst of all, every last one of them looks as if he expects to be taken seriously. (At least the ragtime demons looked as if they were in on the joke.) The suffocating humorlessness of it all is precisely why rock and religion don’t mix and never did.
This would remain true even if heavy metal had never been invented. Back in the Land Of Light, Donovan began to go down the tubes as soon as those Maharishi pix appeared on his albums, and George Harrison flushed himself down the crackerbox in similar fashion. The Moody Blues turned formulaic right after they included that yantra in one of their inner sleeves, didn’t they? Peter Green wound up digging ditches and refusing royalty checks. The Golden Dawn coulda been a contender, but they got caught up in meditation and “listening to the sound of evolution.” (A windchime, no less. Opening cut on their album. In truth they were weighted down by an incompetent record label, but for the purposes of this paragraph we’ll blame it on the windchime.) Violent Femmes never quite regained their momentum after the pro-God stuff on their third album, and Born-Again metaliers like Stryper and Petra couldn’t get any traction to begin with. Stevie Nicks as a witch notwithstanding, as a general rule of thumb we should keep religion off of our albums for the same reason we keep prayer out of our schools. Why’s that? Because the person next to you really doesn’t want to know about yours!, that’s why.
Comus, however, (Remember Comus? This is an article about Comus) manage to slip the noose. Why? Simple: this isn’t a rock album. It’s UK folk-fusion, from the same school as Incredible String Band, C.O.B., The Fool, Trees, Dr. Strangely Strange, Moonkyte, Earthen Vessel, Forest and dozens more whose vinyl drippings might sell for upwards of $200 apiece. The closest you may be able to find at the mall would be albums by the likes of Pentangle, Steeleye Span, the String Band, acoustic Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, some of Donovan’s rootsier material, and perhaps the Celtic music Fiona Ritchie plays on NPR. But all of them (ISB excepted) are more folk than psychedelic; and besides, this is an article about Comus.
OK, so there’s a plug-ugly demon on the cover of First Utterance. (“In the beginning, there was The Word...” And the word was, “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”) For once, he belongs there. This is the album I play every Halloween.
The instrumentation is primarily acoustic, all the usual strings and woodwinds and percussives, and they wear their paganism on their sleeves. The very first song is a hymn to the goddess Diana, and the massed vocals don’t merely sing about “the screaming woodland” and “the baying of the hounds,” the munchkin chorus invokes and embodies these very things--and that’s only the first minute or so of the LP. Theirs is not the happy, life-affirming paganism so fashionable these days; theirs is the sound of dread and paranoia, of remembrance, of fear and loathing, of friends and lovers lost to the Burning Times and the need for true love to rectify all evils. You can’t listen to this for five minutes without wondering about these people’s various lifestyle choices and comparing them with your own.
A friend of mine once considered taking his Comus tape to a Dead show and blasting that in the parking lot instead of Fillmore 2/13/70, which would’ve been fun to watch but would be a horrible thing to inflict on some nice 15-year-old kid who only minutes before had gotten over the hump of anxiety and begun to enjoy his or her first trip. My buddy chickened out, and the lucky kid will never even know of the disaster that was averted thereby.
As I did in my C.O.B. review, and for the same reasons, I’ll quote Gregg Breth:
There’s an EP after that, but it’s so impossibly rare I’ll never get to hear it. Then on their second album, To Keep From Crying, (as in, “I Laughed...”, which as Anton LaVey has said pretty much sums up the devil’s sense of humor), they went electric. Apparently David Bowie had taken an interest in their career--and having David Bowie take you under his wing is scarier than any gargoyle. (He’s King Midas in reverse.) It was more rock-oriented. I told you what happens when this “religion” stuff gets mixed with rock and roll! They never made another album after To Keep From Crying. (And that one only sells for $20.) But First Utterance will never die, First Utterance will live forever...or at least it will be reborn-again every Hallow’s Eve for as long as I shall roam the earth.
“has the most mad and demented atmosphere of any LP of its type. The vocals sound like flipped-out gnomes and trolls having a horrible acid experience, and the playing gives off an atmosphere of being stranded out on the moors knowing that an axe murderer is on the prowl! Don’t play this if you’re in an edgy state of mind--you may not be responsible for your actions during and afterwards. Fantastic cover that illustrates the beauty to be found in ugliness. Charming lyrics as well; they sing about being locked in an asylum, terrorizing those who judge one solely on looks and all manners of lost love in the Gothic UK style of romanticism. As someone recently said, I’d love to see the movie that looks like this sounds!”
This page hosted by 
Get your own Free Home Page